2009-04-24

Pentagon Agency Called it Torture in 2002

The military agency that helped to devise harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.

That's damning. Once again, we have evidence that the Bush Administration knew what they were doing was illegal and produced unreliable information. If you know that these techniques will produce unreliable information, and you then suggest using these techniques to discover a link between 9/11 and Iraq after the invasion, then what you are doing is using torture to procure false confessions. You are no better than the North Koreans, or any of the other torturers history has seen.